So a company or union might say "this is a race to the bottom" when someone new enters their market, but to people buying their services this might be seen as welcome competition.
Do you actually see a negative impact from competition in this area? Or do you just mean competition will further reduce prices?
And if cheaper access is an advantage, other countries will surpass you
We have a good compare, which is cloud in the early 2000s.
Everyone (at the time) thought cloud compute costs would go to zero.
What most corporations didn’t realize is how entrenched your workflows and processes get when you adopt cloud and you become heavily locked in that ecosystem.
That same ecosystem lock-in is what the frontier labs are hoping for with AI.
Now K3 is almost 6x the cost of the original K2 checkpoint, and while the parameter count finally jumped, it's still an extremely sparse MoE and definitely does not cost 6x what the original K2 checkpoint did to host at scale.
Race to the bottom only takes real effect when there's a cap to the capabilities, otherwise everyone races to the bottom of a rising target (how economically valuable the tokens are)
"Why" as in, why take lower margins when Moonshot currently can't service all the demand for the model anyways. Based on past models no one is going to massively undercut Moonshot: few have the chops to serve it as efficiently as Moonshot and of those few, most of them don't go for being the cheapest, they go for being fast + reliable (think Together, Fireworks).
You get what you pay for applies very much with how many axes there are to serving these increasingly large models.
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And for "with what compute": as the value of a token goes up, what people are willing to pay for compute is going up.
Every once in a while I'll see a story about falling rental rates, but with even slightly more established clouds I've been seeing availability get worse and worse over time.
I'm pretty sure the only reason the highly informal indexes don't reflect this is because every neocloud trying to cash in on an NVIDIA Inception discount kicks off by selling unrealistically cheap compute for a bit.
It’s not going to be a singularity at one moment of time. It’s not going to be instant runaway self-improvement, no matter what doomers and fetishists say.
It’s going to be gradual. We’ll see glimmers of AGI, and the “G” part will be about gradual broadening of domains and deepening of capabilities.
All of the coding harnesses are already using their own tools to self-improve, and the HITL component is getting less frequent and at higher levels of abstraction.
That’s how AGI gets here: very gradually, no hard takeoff, and nobody will be able to pinpoint when exactly it happened.
So: also no single lab with a massive advantage, no government takeovers. It’ll be a lot less dramatic than the extremes believe. IMO, of course.
Because it’s a gradient, not a binary.
Imagine all the fear- and warmongering kingmakers and powerful individuals when they realize they have no power over anything or anyone.....so game over for them. They won't like it at all, at all.
Another problem, that in order to make it understand real life, it needs robots or humans wired into it (brain interfaces) in order to test certain things in the real world. And that is another level we know almost nothing about, at least on the surface.
PS: do these self improving harnesses even work?